Chess

Chess – a game of complex strategy. What will be your next move?

Chess is a strategic game played on an 8 by 8 square checkered board, by moving specific pieces to attack and capture.
There are 32 pieces, 16 per player, and six different types of pieces in a game of chess; one king, one queen, two bishops, two rooks, two knights and eight pawns.
Chess is a game played by two people that take turns, and only a single piece may move per turn in most circumstances, while legal movements vary across pieces.
The aim of chess is to put the opponent’s king in a position where capture is unavoidable during the next turn, a position known as ‘checkmate’.
Pieces in chess are usually colour-coded white and black, and white always moves first in a game and is generally considered to have an advantage.

A form of chess was played in Persia around the 600s AD, where it was called ‘chatrang’ or ‘shatranj’, and it is said to be based on a game known as ‘chaturaṅga’ originating from 280 to 550 AD in East India, which featured predecessors of the modern rook, pawn, bishop and knight.
Chess reached Europe by the 800s, and alterations to the game were made from the 1200s and continued through to the late 1400s, with notable updates to the rules regarding the pawns, bishops and queens.
Englishman Howard Staunton coordinated a chess competition in 1851 in the United Kingdom’s London, and this first contemporary contest was won by German Adolf Anderssen, while the first World Championship occurred in 1886, won by Wilhelm Steinitz from Austria.
In its history, chess was used as a way to teach soldiers and knights tactical manoeuvres and strategies for battle, although it is now a game played by children and adults, mostly for entertainment purposes.
Through the use of complex computer algorithms, computers have been designed to be able to play chess almost since the birth of the first digital computers in the mid 1900s, while the first computer to beat a World Chess Champion was Deep Blue in 1997, and since then computers have become increasingly difficult for humans to beat.

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